Posted on June 18th, 2009 by admin
On December 7th, 2000 Canada’s highest court will hear an appeal by two pesticide corporations, Chemlawn and Spraytech, challenging a by-law passed years ago by the municipality of Hudson, Quebec. The by-law would control local use and application of pesticides by homeowners and businesses in the municipality. Two previous attempts to have the by-law quashed [...]
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Posted on March 1st, 2001 by admin
It’s not like we haven’t heard the promises before, but it seems that powerline technology is poised to make an entrance into the home-networking market.
Inari recently announced that it has shipped silicon for its 2-Mbit/sec powerline-networking technology to Thomson Multimedia. Inari is perhaps best known as the creator of the PassPort, one of the few [...]
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Posted on March 1st, 2001 by admin
As FireWire continues to proliferate, we’ll see it embedded into more and more power- and space-conscious applications. Texas Instruments has debuted a new 1394 chip that has integrated link and physical layers and sets new standards for power efficiency and footprint. In sleep mode, the 14-square-millimeter chip can drop power consumption to almost negligible levels [...]
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Posted on March 1st, 2001 by admin
As we describe elsewhere in this issue (see “Game not over,” and “Loaded term“), home gateways are picking up momentum in the marketplace. Market researchers predict that by 2005, gateway hardware will represent a $5 billion party. Accordingly, product teams that wish to join the fun are finding eager dance partners among silicon and software [...]
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Posted on February 14th, 2001 by admin
When we covered Internet telephony products in a hands-on article back in August 2000, the dial-up nature of many of the products available then led to complicated setup routines and—because of limited bandwidth—made the Net telephony experience pretty much intolerable. Now, a relationship between Linksys and Net2Phone has spawned a device that combines telephony with [...]
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Posted on January 1st, 2001 by admin
All the talk about connecting to an array of devices and appliances on your home network is getting closer to becoming a reality with recent announcements from two chip developers.
family of transceivers/microcontrollers is specifically designed for embedding networking functionality into low-cost, everyday applications found in residential, commercial, utility and transportation markets. The U-Chip, which combines [...]
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Posted on December 1st, 2000 by admin
From home LANs to the digital den, applications abound that require highly integrated ICs to meet cost and power requisites to consumer success. The silicon industry is responding with products tailored to specific applications, such as new offerings from ESS Technology and Broadcom for Internet appliances. In both cases, the companies have combined three different [...]
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Posted on November 29th, 2000 by admin
Patriot Scientific Corp. (PTSC) has introduced a home gateway server micro-platform that incorporates both an instruction processing unit and an I/O processor.
The OSGi-compatible Ignite Micro-Platform is a small-outline board that has been designed as a plug-in for developing home gateways, handheld Internet devices, set-top boxes, and other consumer electronics devices. The dual-processor platform, which executes [...]
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Posted on November 1st, 2000 by admin
Members of the DSL Forum have agreed to develop an industrywide standard for the autoconfiguration of DSL customer premises equipment (CPE). The forum has created a new CPE Autoconfiguration Working Group and four subgroups, all tasked with specific assignments related to simplifying and automating end-to-end DSL service delivery. The hope is to produce a plug-and-play [...]
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Posted on November 1st, 2000 by admin
As DSL becomes an accepted—even preferred—method of providing voice services as well as data, voice-ready home gateways are popping up all over the place. Moreover, many recent entrants extend data networking into the home by supporting the HomePNA (Home Phoneline Networking Alliance) standard. Last but not least, these new products claim to provide plug-and-play ease [...]
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